This was the very room he slept in; the Baroness, mother-like, came to see that he was comfortable.  Here he had slept every time since; here he had listened in the early morning for Aurora’s footfall as she passed his door, for the ladies rose earlier than did the men.  He now sat down by the open window; it was a brilliant moonlight night, warm and delicious, and the long-drawn note of the nightingale came across the gardens from the hawthorn bushes without the inner stockade.  To the left he could see the line of the hills, to the right the forest; all was quiet there, but every now and then the sound of a ballad came round the castle, a sound without recognizable words, inarticulate merriment.

If he started upon the hazardous voyage he contemplated, and for which he had been so long preparing, should he ever sleep there again, so near the one he loved?  Was it not better to be poor and despised, but near her, than to attempt such an expedition, especially as the chances (as his common sense told him) were all against him?  Yet he could not stay; he must do it, and he tried to stifle the doubt which insisted upon arising in his mind.  Then he recurred to Durand; he remembered that not once on that day had he exchanged one single word, beyond the first and ordinary salutation, with Aurora.

Might she not, had she chosen, have arranged a moment’s interview?  Might she not easily have given him an opportunity?  Was it not clear that she was ashamed of her girlish fancy for a portionless and despised youth?  If so, was it worth while to go upon so strange an enterprise for her sake?  But if so, also, was life worth living, and might he not as well go and seek destruction?

While this conflict of feeling was proceeding, he chanced to look towards the table upon which he had carelessly placed his lamp, and observed, what in his agitated state of mind he had previously overlooked, a small roll of manuscript tied round with silk.  Curious in books, he undid the fastening, and opened the volume.  There was not much writing, but many singular diagrams, and signs arranged in circles.  It was, in fact, a book of magic, written at the dictation, as the preface stated, of one who had been for seven years a slave among the Romany.

He had been captured, and forced to work for the tent to which his owners belonged.  He had witnessed their worship and their sorceries; he had seen the sacrifice to the full moon, their chief goddess, and the wild extravagances with which it was accompanied.  He had learnt some few of their signs, and, upon escaping, had reproduced them from memory.  Some were engraved on the stones set in their rings; some were carved on wooden tablets, some drawn with ink on parchment; but, with all, their procedure seemed to be the repetition of certain verses, and then a steady gaze upon the picture.  Presently they became filled with rapture, uttered what sounded as the wildest ravings, and (their women especially) prophesied of the future.